By Shivani Tanna
(Reuters) -Japan’s Rakuten aims to invest at least $100 million and increase its headcount by 8% in India this year to strengthen its global operations, a top executive of the internet conglomerate told Reuters.
Rakuten plans to invest “at least three digit millions dollars” to scale up technology, infrastructure and hiring, Rakuten’s India CEO Sunil Gopinath said, without specifying the exact amount.
The company, which operates in sectors such as fintech, e-commerce, and telecom, is using artificial intelligence to enhance operations across key areas including, business tools, customer experience and employee productivity, he said.
Rakuten currently employs 4,000 people in India – 90% of whom are tech staff – and plans to recruit people who it considers “power users” of AI.
“We look for AI-savvy people that we can intersperse across the company,” Gopinath said.
The India global capability centre (GCC) is a key contributor in building Rakuten Pay, a major payment app in Japan, and its SixthSense platform, which is used to track the health of a system and flag issues.
“It (SixthSense) is almost like Sherlock Holmes, so we are able to figure out not only what has happened automatically, but we can actually project and predict an issue happening before it happens,” Gopinath said.
The SixthSense platform is used by a wide range of clients including banks, healthcare companies, airlines, and the government of India.
Rakuten generated a profit of 10.5 billion yen ($73.62 million) in fiscal year 2024 by using AI, and aims to double this in 2025. Last year, employees almost halved their time to create sales material, according to its full-year earnings presentation.
Rakuten’s India GCC operates about 50% of the company’s 70-plus businesses, with offices at multiple locations in the country, including two centers in the southern city of Bengaluru.
The market size of India’s GCCs is expected to be valued at up to $105 billion by fiscal year 2030 from $64.6 billion in 2024, according to a report by IT industry body Nasscom and consulting firm Zinnov.
($1 = 142.6200 yen)
(Reporting by Shivani Tanna in Bengaluru; Editing by Varun H K)
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